A collaboration project between tranzit/sk, Studio IN (Department of Intermedia and Multimedia, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava) in the context of the Open Studio program, and Kunsthalle Bratislava.

The most important cultural currents of Russian modern and contemporary art morphed into unmistakable local forms which differ from the "parallels" or "patterns" of their resources. This was the case not only with Conceptualism and Pop Art, but also with Performance Art.

Project investigates the changing destiny of post-war modernist architecture: the research demonstrates how the reception of post-war modern architecture in Central and Easter Europe fades into the memory of the state-socialism.

Catarina Simão (b. 1972) is an Lisbon-based artist whose practice is built upon long term research projects that entail collaborative partnerships and different forms of presentation to the public, such as art installations, screenings, participatory workshops and talks.

Branislav Dimitrijević holds the position of Professor of Art History and Cultural Theory at the School for Art and Design (“Visoka škola likovnih i primenjenih umetnosti”) and lectures part-time at Academia Nova in Belgrade. At the University of Arts in Belgrade, he leads a course on Curatorial practice. Main fields of his theoretical and curatorial interest are visual theory and visual culture, art in public space and relations of common culture to politics and ideology.

A dialogue on the relation of ownership and authorship, architecture and reasoning by Office of Cognitive Urbanism, Vienna (Andreas Spiegl and Christian Teckert) /

Our project will reflect the neighbourhood of authorship and ownership, the reason and the house. We want to question the consequences of this relation, what it means if the reason becomes a temporal house, a house that always belongs to someone else.

Angelika Richter, independent curator and art historian based in Berlin

Zora Bútorová, sociologist based in Bratislava

Ilona Németh, artist, professor at AFAD, Bratislava

The discussion will be held in English.

We can say that in the 20th century, the status of documentary practices in photography and film was that of a veristic discipline mechanically capturing the moment. This veristic nature of documentary was appropriated by art, or it has temporarily became art under the pressure of artistic manifestations and interpretations. Following the ‘documentary turn, the dilemma of the discourse on the moment’s verism and art’s authenticity loses its meaningfulness. One of the trajectories of the documentary turnaround is the documentary approach to the construction of memory and histories.
This is also the path taken by the work of Ilona Németh, entitled Rudolf Szabó (Rezső Szabó), (2014). Its main protagonist, the author’s uncle, ponders the peripeties of the leftist reformism in the wake of the soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. He is also describing his long-term activities in the field of national minorities’ equalisation during the Socialism era, as well as shortly after 1989. The panellists will discuss Ilona Németh’s work in the light of wider contexts – the differentiated view of the reformist movement in 1968, the documentary practices in relation to memory as a signifying chain, as well as in the relation between the real social engagement and its documentary representation.

Published by Peter Lang, International Academic Publishers, Frankfurt am Main and Veda, SAS Publishing House, Bratislava 2013.
The publication has been produced within the scope of the PATTERNS Lectures project, initiated by ERSTE Foundation and implemented by WUS Austria. www.patternslectures.org

The discussion takes place within the framework of the exhibition The Need for Practice, which concentrates on the necessity of re-thinking the relation between theory and practice, symbolic resistance and direct action, art and activism, and builts on self-organisation viewed as a meaningful practice, that allows for linking individual initiative to common interest, while manitaining diversity and difference.

In his lecture, Ciprian Mureşan will present the main directions of his work and will elaborate on his latest projects based on a particular handling of drawing as both product and operating tool in a nexus of references and positioning.

The Július Koller Society and the Slovak National Gallery are proud to present the first international conference on the oeuvre of Július Koller (1939–2007) /

Date: 23–26 April 2009

In its stringency, obsession and peculiarity, the oeuvre of Július Koller is one of the most erratic and consistent in European art since the 1960s. Yet Koller is not only a seminal figure in the history of the neo- and post-avant-garde; his work has long been a critical inspiration for artists and intellectuals. In the most recent past, Kollers concepts of the Anti-Happening, the Anti-Picture, the Universal-cultural Futurological Operation (U.F.O.), his actions, objects, texts and the enormous referential archive he built up, have attracted growing interest on the part of a broader art public, and his works have found their way into major collections and museums all over Europe and beyond.